


end of the line

by taylortot



Series: the way i love you [10]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Established Relationship, Kissing, M/M, Season 8 stuff, Soft Keith (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22103464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylortot/pseuds/taylortot
Summary: in which keith and lance prepare for their last battle, the night before
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Series: the way i love you [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1189551
Comments: 64
Kudos: 725





	end of the line

Keith breaks the silence vibrating in the room quietly with a long, drawn out sigh, easing some of the tension in his shoulders. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Lance slump a little further over the table, too, like that one breath has released him from a prison of his own. He reaches over and takes Lance’s hand where it rests in a curled fist against the top of his thigh; he draws it into his own lap and slowly opens Lance’s fist with his thumb, gentle and methodical.

Lance responds to the touches easily despite still looking closed off, avoiding eye contact. His hand opens up like a flower in spring, and Keith threads his fingers through the spaces between Lance’s, pressing their palms together flat like two pieces of paper. Like puzzle pieces. Like coming home.

“It’s getting late,” Lance murmurs, staring down at the table, his voice low and unemotional. 

Keith squeezes his hand. “Yeah.”

Slowly, Lance turns to look at him—there’s something hollow about the look on his face, drawn and vaguely severe. Distant. The anxiety sits there in the swelling emptiness of Lance’s expression and Keith—who is puffed full of a scathing determination to not think about tomorrow  _ at all _ —aches to press feeling and security back into Lance with his hands. Aches to leave bruises in the shapes of his fingertips, aches to see Lance close, breath easy, forehead smooth and eyes muddled with an afterglow.

He brings Lance’s hand to his mouth with both of his, pressing a long kiss to the valleys and mountains of his knuckles. “Let’s go to bed,” Keith murmurs against his skin, feeling how his eyebrows cut low over his eyes, the rough scrape of his voice filling the space between them.

Lance stares at him, for a moment looking uncertain, but then he squeezes Keith’s hand back and sighs, dropping his eyes. “Yeah.”

They take their time heading back to their room, hands still linked like a lifeline between them. Despite the sense of time tick, tick, ticking away, there’s a desire to slow down, to revel in this stillness before the chaos of tomorrow takes over. Lance’s hand is warm in his, solid and gripping, and that steadies him, grounds him. It quiets the part of him that is whispering, begging, to put Lance back at ease—to calm Lance so that he can calm himself.

When they get to their room, Lance drops his hand to grab a change of clothes and then makes his way into the bathroom with single-minded focus, as if he must do everything deliberately to avoid letting his thoughts wander. Keith can relate—and he wants to help, wants to forget, too. So he follows closely behind, stepping into the bathroom on Lance’s heels, and when Lance turns around to close the door, Keith is already there.

Lance looks up at him with a furrowed brow. “You showered this morning.” It sounds more like a question than a statement, his gaze clouded, hard and delicate at the same time, in a way that Keith can’t quite fathom. He doesn’t know what’s going on in his head when he looks at Keith like that. After all this time together, Lance is still a mystery to him, somehow, as unpredictable as ever. How can he know someone so well and still not at all?

He passes a hand over the sensor to close the bathroom door behind him, allowing himself to be earnest with Lance. “I want to be with you.”

His murmured honesty is warm enough to melt a little bit of the ice chips in Lance’s eyes, softening the edges of him as his tense shoulders drop with a slow exhale. He nods, turning his face from Keith. “Okay,” he says softly.

Keith watches fondly as Lance puts his clothes down and then starts the hot water for a shower before turning to face him. Then, he steps forward and Lance leans back against the counter as Keith takes his face in his hands gently and searches his expression as he closes in on him, their hair brushing together at their foreheads. Lance lets out a shaky exhale as his eyes flutter to a close, reaching up to circle his fingers around Keith’s wrists, as though to keep him where he’s at. Keith sighs, pressing light little kisses to each of Lance’s closed eyelids, his cheeks, the flat space between his eyebrows. He commits every one of Lance’s steady breaths to memory, each of his sun-stained freckles, the way his dark eyelashes feather against his cheeks. 

“I love you,” Keith whispers against the bone at the top of Lance’s cheek.

Lance furrows his eyebrows, opening his eyes into slits, looking off to the side like he can’t stand to see the look on Keith’s face. “Don’t.”

Keith ignores him, presses the words again into the corner of Lance’s mouth. “I love you.”

“Keith.” Lance slides his hands down the length of Keith’s forearms, his voice reserved, surrendering with a waver.

“Lance, look at me.”

Reluctantly, Lance slides his gaze back towards Keith.

Keith rubs his thumb back and forth tenderly against the short hair around his ears. “We’re gonna be fine,” he murmurs.

“I know,” Lance whispers, fiercely, like he wants to believe it. He looks up at Keith, eyebrows crinkled. “I just—I don’t want you to say that to me like—I don’t want you to say it like a goodbye.” His eyes are icy, determinedly cold, his mouth screwed up in a frown.

“I’m not saying goodbye,” Keith assures him, heart aching, the words falling from him effortlessly in a desperate bid to make Lance understand. “I’m saying tomorrow, when this is over, we’re going to go home and we’re gonna see your family again. I’m saying I’m going to marry you the first chance I get, and everyone you love is going to be there. I’m saying we’re going to  _ live _ , Lance.”

Lance blinks up at him, the crease between his eyebrows deepening, clutching at Keith’s forearms. “How are you so sure?” 

“Hey,” Keith says softly, brushing his thumb against the line of Lance’s jaw. “We’ve made it this far, haven’t we?” 

Lance stares for another minute and then lets out a long, low breath, eyes fluttering closed again. “Yeah. We have.” He lingers on that, leaning into Keith’s touch, as if he’s drawing strength from it, and that’s something, isn’t it? That Keith can give him strength like that? “I love you,” Lance swears fervently, quietly, and when he opens his eyes again, the cold distance is completely gone. His gaze burns like twin stars, decided and present and focused.

“I love you, too,” Keith promises in a low breath, speaking the words directly into Lance’s mouth as he leans in and kisses him. It’s slow and sweet, unhurried. Lance seems to take his time with him, indulging in the pace that Keith has set, his hands running back up Keith’s arms to circle his wrists and hold him there. He lets Keith press him into the counter as the steam from the running water begins to swirl around them in insistent little tendrils, clawing at their clothes. When he pulls back, he slides his hands down the column of Lance’s throat to start working at the buttons of his jacket, fingers methodical, feeling Lance’s attention, the weight of his gaze on his face through half-lidded eyes.

The air is sticky and hot, clinging to Keith’s temples, dampening his hair. Each button slips easily from it’s loop and Lance stands there with his hands at his sides. His chest moves beneath Keith’s fingers as Lance struggles to catch his breath, neither of them saying a word. There’s not much left to say; Keith has never been able to properly capture his emotions through words alone, and now he just wants to be close to Lance, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat.

Once he’s made it to the bottom, he slides his hands back up Lance’s stomach and chest, his hands beneath the fabric and still separated from Lance’s skin by a thin black shirt meant to wick away sweat and keep him cool. His gaze follows his hands, easing the jacket off of the slope of Lance’s broad shoulders, reverent about it, as though he’s never had the privilege of undressing this gorgeous boy in front of him before, as though he'll never get the chance to do it again.

His hands follow the sleeves from Lance’s arms, chasing it down as the fabric finally falls away and pools in a heap on the floor beneath them. Keith can’t help himself; he leans in and places a kiss to his shoulder as his hands find Lance’s waist and skate around to the back, inching under the shirt and slowly moving it up his torso with patient fingers. Lance sighs against the attention, twitching a little when Keith reaches the messy scar on his back and kisses the freckle beneath his ear.

He leans away only far enough to pull the shirt off, up and over Lance’s head, mussing his short hair, before he’s coming back, pressing his lips to the corner of Lance’s jaw. The shirt ends up discarded beside them, and then Lance is grabbing for Keith’s jacket with a touch of desperation, a little tremble in his hands, a hitch in his breath. Keith takes his hands in both of his and kisses his fingers, his palms, his wrists, his knuckles—anywhere he can reach.

“Hey,” he whispers against them. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“Keith,” Lance whispers back, fervent, the fracture in his voice nearly too subtle to hear. “Let me touch you."

Keith presses Lance’s hands palms down to his own chest and leans in for another kiss, this one longer than the first, every shift of Lance’s hands beneath his making his skin prickle with heat. Lance is quicker in pulling Keith’s clothes off—still unrushed, still living moment by moment, but he doesn’t linger. His hands find all of the divots of Keith’s muscles, and trace over all of the scars littered from hip to cheek and Keith burns warm and low beneath the attention, his own hands heavy at his sides as Lance returns the favor.

Before long, they’ve both discarded the last of their clothing and step into the hot spray of the shower, steam swirling around them. Keith crowds up against Lance, making it easier to share the water, and Lance sighs at the proximity, reaching up to brush all of Keith’s hair back from his face, wetting it down. Keith smiles and tips his head back, lets Lance scratch at his scalp gently with shampoo and rinse it out afterwards.

Lance takes his time again with the soap, skimming his hands through the suds on Keith’s body, slower than before as though to better commit every inch of him to memory. Keith can only let him wander for so long before he’s moving, grabbing Lance by the waist and pulling him up against his soapy body. For the first time in days, Lance laughs, bracing himself against Keith’s shoulders so that his feet don’t slip against the slick tile. The sound is so good that Keith has to kiss him, once and then twice and then a third time, for good measure.

“This is exactly why I can’t take showers with you,” Lance says softly, amused, as Keith pulls back. He thumbs gently at Keith’s throat. “Handsy.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to apologize,” Keith says seriously, squeezing at Lance’s sides firmly, tilting his head to expose more of his neck to Lance’s wandering gaze.

Lance rolls his eyes but he’s smiling. “As if.” His thumb runs that tender trail again, up and down, slicked by the water, and his smile grows softer as he focuses on the motion. “It’s just what I need right now.”

Keith lets his hands move lower from Lance’s hips, over the dip of the small of his back as the water falls over both of them. “Lance.” He pauses for a moment and then smooths his hands back up Lance’s sides, feeling the hard, lean muscle beneath his touch and follows the path with his eyes, until he is holding Lance’s face in his hands and settling him with his gaze. “What else do you need?”

“C’mere,” Lance murmurs softly, angling his chin up.

Keith leans in for another kiss and Lance wraps his arms tightly around his neck, pressing himself even closer, the steam making the whole stall hazy and dreamlike, separate from the harsh reality outside of this bathroom. Keith’s hands drop from Lance’s face to instead hold him around his waist, tilting his head into the kiss, letting Lance lead.

“We’re gonna be fine,” Lance whispers against his mouth, softly.

Keith hums. “We’re gonna be fine.”

“We’re gonna go home.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re gonna get married.”

Keith’s heart trembles, throat tightening with emotion for a brief moment before it passes. “Yes.”

Lance nestles his face against the wet stretch of Keith’s neck, the water at his back. “What about after? What are we gonna do after?”

“We could get a house,” Keith murmurs into his ear, stroking a hand up Lance’s slick back, the water still hot, the air humid.

“You wanna buy a house with me?” Lance asks, sounding incredulous, like the thought hadn’t occurred to him before. It makes Keith wonder what Lance had pictured. An apartment? A dorm at the Garrison? A room in a spaceship a hundred galaxies away from here?

“I wanna do everything with you,” Keith tells him. 

Lance tucks himself closer with a shaky breath. “Love you, Keith. Love you, love you,  _ love you _ .”

The emotion chokes Keith again and he buries his face into Lance’s neck, too, unable to speak. 

**Author's Note:**

> A million years later and I’ve finally updated this series LOL I’m not particularly happy with this one but I just wanted to finish it. Start the year off right, and all that. I hope you liked it anyway! Thank you for reading!!!


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